ONE OF THE ATTRACTIONS of Isola Farnese was that apart from our own intrusion and the conspicuous idleness of the Count and his family, this was a working village devoid of parasitism. The doctor came from La Storta, there was no policeman, a single shopkeeper, a taciturn couple who ran the bar, and a baker who turned out enough fresh bread every day to go round. The local wine came from a tiny triangle of vineyard on a hillside. It was doused with sprays from time to time, and when harvested the grapes still carried a bluish veneer from the spraying and were tossed into a vat without any attempt to remove this or sundry foliage snatched up by the machine that did the picking, before the wine-making took place.
The thin and acidulous white wine of Isola Farnese was sold in the local bar, but bottled with an impressive label, featured also in the wine list of the Di Stefano restaurant, the sole enclave in the village of the outside world. Di Stefano remained a bit of a mystery to the locals, because only the village women who were called in to clean the place up after business was at an end on Sunday had ever been allowed to put their noses inside its inner rooms. Di Stefano’s opened on Saturdays and Sundays only, and Sunday lunch was the great event of the week for middle-class Italy, here as elsewhere. Every table for this meal was always booked, and occupied in the main by men in dark suits who arrived in black Alfa Romeos. These customers who travelled here from Rome and consumed enormous amounts of food in the hours between midday and four were supposed to be members of the Sicilian Mafia known to have established itself in the capital. They were highly popular with the staff for their courteous and considerate behaviour and the generosity of their tips.
The restaurant was splendidly sited on the far end of the enormous rock supporting the castle and offered an unequalled prospect of the slightly unearthly landscape I had viewed in part through the narrow windows of the castle itself. Bronzed and burnished autumn fields had been flung over the low hills in a way that identified this as Etruscan country. Sharp-edged black patches marked hollows in which chestnut groves grew. Most remarkable was some atmospheric trick by which for an hour or so around high noon a deep blue boundary divided the horizon from the sky where the salt wind blew in from the sea.
It was a setting that enchanted the Count, who had invited me to join him here for lunch on his saint’s day. Much of his early life, he said, had been spent in an attempt to escape the flatness of Venice. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a landscape that takes wings.’
The waiters, silent, swift and starched into their outdated uniforms, transported us into the vanished kingdom of Victor Emmanuel III and its servilities that had survived in this environment. ‘If I am not disturbing the gentlemen,’ the head waiter said, ‘may I present our menu of the day?’ What was on offer, in its elaborations and absurdities, also recalled an exaggerated past. Cardollini prati di Lazio (goldfinches from the fields of Latium), four on a skewer, baby octopus no bigger than a large spider — of which a sample was produced — pig’s snout Viterbo style, braised with assorted fungus; testicles of milk lamb in saffron rice. The Count swept the suggestions away with patrician contempt. ‘A decadent imposture,’ he said, in reference to the Di Stefano cuisine. ‘I am a simple eater.’ To the waiter he said, ‘Give me a woodpigeon, if you can assure me that it is not from the deep-freeze.’ The waiter returned a slight bow. ‘It can be feathered in Sir’s presence if Sir desires,’ he said. ‘At least the flesh is wholesome,’ the Count assured me. ‘At this time of the year the birds feed on nuts.’ I agreed to follow his example.
Cautiously I watched the men in dark suits, who hardly raised their eyes, absorbed with food. They were stamped with a strange uniformity in clothing, facial expression and gesture. A few were accompanied by glamorous women from whom they seemed strangely aloof and who were on show here rather as part of the accepted setting of mafiosi lives. Surreptitiously I studied the nearest couple as the man chewed thoughtfully on the tiny black carcase removed from a skewer before raising the little flower-painted bowl to his lips to dispose of the inedible aftermath. His friend displayed in profile the sweet emptiness of a Meissen shepherdess as she raked on a lobster shell with a silver claw. A musician in medieval trappings moved quietly into position behind them and began to scrape on his violin, and the man instantly dropped a 5,000-lire note on the table and dismissed him with a flick of the forefinger.
‘He is eating a sparrow in the belief that it is a goldfinch,’ said the Count, sotto voce, and almost without moving his lips. ‘On the same principle he pays dearly for the kisses of a courtesan to convince himself they are those of love. You have heard of men of respect?’ I told him I had. ‘This is the Rome style. Even those who manipulate the rulers of our country can be deluded. Even they can be made fools of.’
Below us a boy and girl moved into sight on a short length of road visible beneath us skirting the rock as it unwound uphill. The girl was the Count’s seventeen-year-old adopted daughter, Zo-Zo, and the boy her fourteen-year-old village admirer whose father followed the profession of wheelwright, still much in demand in an area where metalled surfaced roads were few, and farm carts still in use on the rough country tracks. The pair were inseparable, a situation which appeared to cause not the slightest surprise among our phlegmatic village neighbours. It was an imperturbability that appeared to be shared by the Count and his wife. ‘There they go again,’ he said on this occasion. ‘I cannot understand where the attraction lies in long walks under the midday sun, especially with Zo-Zo’s fair skin.’
‘What’s the news of her?’ I asked. ‘Will she be going to university?’
‘We’ve given up the idea. She wants to stay here.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘Both Alice and I have decided she must do as she pleases. She’s on drugs. We have to keep an eye on her. It’s better she stays where she is.’
I was staggered. I shook my head. ‘You amaze me. Zo-Zo — she seems such a quiet girl. I’d never have believed it. What a problem for you.’
‘The top form at the school was full of junkies. I imagine it still is. A dolce vita while it lasted, but what comes next? Dr Pecorella broke the news to me, but we’d suspected something of the kind.’
‘Wouldn’t one of the small provincial universities be something to consider?’
‘They wouldn’t have her, and in any case she wouldn’t stay. She’d take the first train back. I know her only too well.’
‘So you put up with the attachment. It can’t have been an easy decision for you and Alice to take.’
‘It wasn’t really difficult. The boy’s good for her. He keeps her quiet. I should explain both Alice and I are followers of Epicurus and he always comes to the rescue in situations like this.’
‘Didn’t he favour a luxurious style of life?’
‘Far from it,’ the Count said. ‘His doctrine was one of moderation. He recommends the pursuit of sensible satisfactions and a calm approach to emergency. Whenever it is possible, he says, take the easy way out, which is what we are doing in this case. Zo-Zo is home. She is here to stay, and we cannot rid ourselves of our responsibility, even if that were possible, by burying her in a university. This being the case, let her be as happy as she can.’ He pointed to a verse in archaic and barely readable lettering fixed to the restaurant’s wall. It was by Lorenzo II Magnifico, regarded by some as the great man’s inevitable descent into triteness when he took time off from statesmanship to venture on the more difficult path of poetic composition.
Quanto e bella giovinezza
— Che se fugge tuttavia,
Chi vuol’ essere lieto sia,
De doman’ non v’e certezza.*
At this moment the waiter appeared with a trolley with a covered dish over a low burner containing the pigeons. A junior followed at his heels with another, charged with a great variety of contorni, momentarily inspected by the Count who showed a trace of irritation before waving them away. ‘Just the pigeons,’ he said to the waiter. He turned to me. ‘How extraordinary,’ he said, ‘that the Master’s reputation in Italy should be as it is despite his complete indifference to food.’
* How beautiful is youth,
As it escapes us,
Take what joy you can of it.
Of the morrow there’s no knowing.